1st Edition
Diverse Voices in Photographic Albums “These Are Our Stories”
Through a variety of case studies by global scholars from diverse academic fields, this book explores photographic-album practices of historically marginalized figures from a range of time periods, geographic locations, and socio-cultural contexts. Their albums' stories span various racial, ethnic, gender and sexual identities; nationalities; religions; and dis/abilities.
The vernacular albums featured in this volume present narratives that move beyond those reflected in our existing histories. Essays examine the visual, material, and aural strategies that album-makers have used to assert control over the presentation of their histories and identities, and to direct what those narratives have to say, a point of special relevance as these albums move out of private domestic space and into public archives, institutions, and digital formats. This book does not consider photographic albums and scrapbooks as separate genres, but as a continuum of modern creative practices of photographic and mass-print collage aimed at self-expression and narrative-building that co-evolved and were readily accessible.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, visual culture, material culture, media studies, and cultural studies.
Introduction
1. The Album’s Diverse Histories
Mary Trent
Complicating Family Narratives
2. Women on Holiday: Intergenerational Narratives in Photographic Albums from India
Suryanandini Narain
3. ‘Children of Shadowland’: A Family’s Scrapbook Story of Intellectual Disability
James Trent
4. Henry Darger’s Album of Orphans and Fugitives
Mary Trent
Stepping Out of "the Closet," Privately
5. ‘Dropping Hairpins’: Cisgender Performance and ‘Homosociality’ in William Whitney’s Fin-de-Siècle College Albums
Kris Belden-Adams
6. A Scissored Gay Life of the 1930s and 1940s: The Scrapbooks of Ogden Salmon
James Kaser
7. In Plain Sight: Album-Making and Queer Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century South Africa
Danielle Kinsey
Retelling National and International Histories
8. ‘We Carry the Weight of a 150-Year Legacy’: Sharing the Memories of a U.S. Civil War Photograph Album
Michèle Gates Moresi
9. The Politics of Floating: Space and Experience in G. Prat photograph album of China and Japan, 1874-1900
Xinyue Yuan
10. Collecting the Indian Congress: Reframing Indigenous Photography Albums from the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition
Karen Barber
11. Secrets from the Family Album: Official and Silenced Knowledge on Migration
Ya’ara Gil-Glazer
Conclusions
12. Conclusions: Albums and Diverse Communities
Kris Belden-Adams
Afterword
Margaret Vendryes
Biography
Mary Trent is an Assistant Professor of Art and Architectural History at College of Charleston, South Carolina, USA.
Kris Belden-Adams is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Mississippi, USA.
"Recommended. ...This volume examines a large range of photo albums in three varied categories—family, female homosexuality, and history. ... In addition to the texts, the book includes an enormous number of informative references, footnotes, bibliographies, biographies, and more."
--CHOICE
